A Little News

Volleyball is the toughest sport for me to shoot.  I am close to the action, the ball moves fast and I am frequently tied to flash.  That means I have many, many more misses than hits when shooting volleyball.  You may be the same boat as me and if you are I have some tips that may help you.

First, and this is the easiest, most fool proof method of shooting volleyball, get high and focus on the net.  A great deal of predictable action happens right around the net.  If you get on a balcony or the top of the bleachers behind one of the teams you will have a clear view of the action around the net.  This will give you a safe action photo that you can take back from any game you may cover.  The second benefit to the high behind position is it allows you to cover action on the floor on the half of the court nearest you.  For those of you who like to be predictable you can stop reading now.

If you want to be a little more adventurous, drop down to the floor and shoot from behind one of the judges.  You can sit on the floor and cover both halves of the court and you will have a low point of view which may, or may not, work for you but you will never know until you try.  This position allows you to shoot some of the dives and digs that happen near floor level.  This makes for some cool shots.  The problem is two fold.  The action is unpredictable and it moves very fast and you can have an awful lot of legs between you and the action.  Obviously it is not as dependable a shooting position but it can give you more cool action and facial expressions.

You can also try shooting on the baseline behind one of the teams.  You have the same trouble with bodies between you and much of the action but when you get a shot it will typically be pretty nice.  You can shoot net shots but what I like to do from this position is look for action on or near the floor on the opposite side of the net.  Alternatively, this is a good place to use a normal to wide lens for players chasing balls toward you.  This happens once in a while but not often enough to depend on it for you money shot.

Vary your lens choice and look for chances to shoot with your wide lens.  It will only give you a single frame or maybe two frames at most but it can be a nice break from shooting with long glass and it will yield an image your sports editors are not always seeing.  You can go really long and shoot as tight as you can on places where the action is predictable such as serves and blocks and spikes around the net.  Obviously, a 70-200 is your best friend.

Maybe you will be lucky some of the time and can shoot available light.  This has happened to me; once.  The photos with this post were done available light at ISO 1600 using my EOS 5D.  I would not have tried this with the D2H.  There would have been too much noise.  Most of the time you will be tied to some kind of strobe set up unless you are covering college or pro games.  I like to bounce my strobes off the ceiling when possible when I am shooting volleyball because of the quality of light.  Unfortunately, this is not possible in all high school gyms.  You just have to be flexible when positioning your lights and try and cover the highest percentage of the court possible with even lighting.  Having f stop fall off is not something that is easy to deal with in post production so pay attention to your lighting and work it until you have it pretty well nailed down.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Friday, I got a call to go cover a serious traffic accident. The inital reports were an 18 wheeler and a little four wheel ATV. That would have been an automatic fatality so, thank God, the initial reports were incorrect. There was a very bad accident involving an 18 wheeler and a car with one person critically injured. The accident site was about 20 minutes from where I was at the time of the call and when I arrived on scene the occupant of the car was still trapped inside. Firefighters were just cutting the top off the car to extricate the driver.

I parked well outside the emergency zone. This is a standard practice for me. I would rather walk a good distance into the site than to park too close and be told to move or be ticketed. I began shooting pictures immediately as I approached; although, I knew we would never use the photos. I do this just in case an officer stops me from getting closer or just stops me from shooting period. If that happens I will have a few frames already shot.

Like covering a fire, mobility on the accident scene is your best friend. The lead photo could really only be shot from one position and that position was partially blocked by an emergency vehicle. I also asked one of the firefighters if there was a fatality as soon as I got close to the scene. We have a policy that prohibits us from showing a body, even a body part or, in some cases, even a sheet covering a body. We are a community paper and we live with the people we are photographing so there is some understandable sensitivity to death images. The firefighter told me the person was critically injured so I was very careful to make sure she was not actually visible in the photos. We usually don’t publish an image where the person in the photo is injured to such a degree that they could die before publication of the photo. Again, this is just a sensitivity to the community values that I do truly appreciate.

The accident scene was spread over something like 75 to 100 yards of highway. The 18 wheeler had spilled its load and the impact and resulting forces ripped the two wheel trucks from the back of the trailer. One of the wheel trucks was laying in the middle of the scene halfway between the truck and car and the other wheel truck was actually laying across the cab of the truck. I knew this would be my secondary photo. I had very free access to the scene as long as I was out of the way of the rescuers so I used my mobility to get as many angles as possible making sure to include the rescuers working over the decimated car in at least one photo.

When the MedFlight helicopter landed I saw I could work the helo into the photo with the cab of the truck and as the patient was loaded I made my way to the truck cab to line up the shot. As the helo took off I was able to get the shot of the damaged truck in the foreground with the helo taking off over it. I left the scene immediately after getting this shot so I could cross the highway before the lanes were reopened to traffic. This sounds trivial but try crossing two lanes of traffic on foot while the traffic is going in opposite directions after the highway is reopened. The traffic will be solid for about 15 or 20 minutes because they stopped all traffic while the helo was on the ground. It is just a good safety precaution for me. You would not believe how people drive around accident scenes. It is crazy. Stay out of their way unless you want to become part of the news. Just ask a cop, rubberneckers are the worst.

About the photos: All shots in this post were done with a Nikon D2H and an 80-200 f2.8 and a Nikon D2Hs with a 17-35mm f2.8 using only available light. There is nothing technical to report just keep moving and getting your angles.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily, Gary Cosby Jr. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

It kind of struck me the other day that being positioned for success is not just for sports.  Positioning yourself well is the key to all kinds of excellent photojournalism and spot news is no exception.  In fact, covering spot news is a lot like covering a sports assignment.  You are looking for peak action and emotional reaction.  I thought I would begin with the spot news that I know best which would be covering fires.

First note, I do not speed going to spot news assignments.  Number one, I don’t like tickets and cops don’t care if I am in a hurry to get to the fire.  Number two, my life and safety are of much greater value to me than a house fire.  Number three, the lives and safety of other motorists on the road are equally important and I do not need to risk theirs to get a picture.  That said, I hurry safely!

Regarding fires in the city, unless it is a big, nasty fire, I am not going to get there before the fire department has all the flames knocked down.  They are just too good and too fast.  Fire in volunteer districts where response times are slower give a greater opportunity but they also usually take longer to get there.  Big fires, no matter if they are in the city or in the county, will still be burning when I get there.  It is just like a fatal accident, it will still be there when I arrive just don’t kill yourself getting there, literally.

Now, on the scene, the most important thing to remember is that your job is secondary to the job the firefighters are doing.  Stay out of the way.  I have been both a firefighter and a photojournalist and I can say that, as a firefighter, I am not thinking about you.  I am laser focused on my job.  So, stay back and let them work.  There are a few occassions when I have spoken to a battallion chief while the fire was going but I am always careful to be very brief and pick moments where he is not obviously busy.

Mobility on the fireground is your best friend.  Keep your feet under you and keep moving.  One minute, you may have a great shot in front of you and the next the fire may shift to another part of the building entirely.  There have been a number of fires where there was noting much happening in front of the building but chaos was erupting in the back.  Walk around and stay out of the way.  BTW, don’t trample people’s flower beds and gardens and stuff like that.  Be a citizen first and have a care for where you are and what you are doing.  Don’t make a bad situation worse.

Try to use all your lenses.  Try to avoid strobes.  Don’t forget to actually compose and make images rather than just snapping wildly away as your adrenaline drives your shutter finger.  Think about what you are doing and seeing.  Don’t forget to try and layer your images, especially with the wide lenses.  Use the hoses, fire trucks and firefighters to make visual layers in your image.  A burning building demands enough attention on its own and you can turn a dramatic fire image into a great one by layering.

There is emotion on the fire ground from time to time too.  Unfortunatley, fire is a very deadly thing and people die and are seriously injured in fires.  People lose pets in fires.  That may sound trivial but I remember pulling up to fires to hear a home owner screaming that her baby was inside.  What she meant was she had a pet in the house.  The only rescue I actually made when I was a firefighter was of a screaming cat.  I never knew a cat could make such a noise.  It survived and the last I saw of it was it careening down the street after I let it down.

Try and be sensitive to the misery of others.  There is nothing like having the assembled collections of your life be destroyed in a fire.  It happened to my wife when she was a girl.  You have to photograph it but don’t be a jerk.  Behave in the manner you could respect if you were on the other side of the camera.  That is pretty good advice for almost any shooting situation.  I am going to cut this off and try and be a bit more specific in the next post.

About the photos: The top photo is one showing the value of movement.  I shot several frames in front of the house but the scene was a little bland.  I walked through an alley and into the back and there was a great shot I would have never seen without moving.  D2H with a 80-200 f2.8 available light.  The second photo is from an apartment fire in town.  I used the D2H with a 17-35mm f2.8 to accentuate the ladder and the foreground to background relationship.  The last photo is from a church fire.  The front of the building was billowing smoke but I found the flames around back.  Being prepared allowed me to catch the firefighter shedding tournouts as a result of suffering heat exhaustion.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily, Gary Cosby Jr.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.